Chinese characters

Learning Chinese characters can be a struggle to begin with but once the basics have been mastered, each new character can take you on a fascinating journey through Chinese history and culture. In the language section we have an introduction to the Chinese language and also show how the characters are drawn with brush or pen strokes. Here we look at the basic classes of characters and the origins of some of the most frequently used characters in Chinese.

Routledge Grammar:Basic Chinese

If you want to go beyond speaking and writing 'tourist Chinese' you need a good grounding in Chinese grammar. This Routledge guide goes far beyond memorizing useful phrases and serves as an essential course if you want to speak Chinese well and understand Chinese text. All the Chinese is in both pinyin and characters. It does not include a dictionary section so you will need a dictionary in conjunction with the book.More details... ➚

The characters are split into groups. The first are the ancient pictographs, these characters are derived from drawings of objects in everyday life probably over 10,000 years ago. During the period 5,000 to 6,000 years ago the pictures were augmented with indirect and abstract symbols, this class is called the 指事zhǐ shì 'refer to matters'.
Different kingdoms in the China area used different characters and it all became quite confusing. It was the discovery of writing on oracle bones from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200BCE) that has greatly added to the knowledge of the characters used in ancient days. At this time the characters remained mainly pictorial, it was then and in the later Han Dynasty that characters began to include components that indicate how they should be pronounced - the phonetic part. Up until then looking at a character gave no hint as to how to say it. Nowadays about 80% of characters have a 'phonetic' part indicating how it might be pronounced, these are called the 形声xíng shēngappear sound class of character . The phonetics over the centuries have changed and recognizing the phonetic part is not a totally reliable guide to pronunciation. As well as phonetic components there are a relatively small number of ‘meaning’ or ‘determinative’ components; these radicals indicate that the character which uses it is in a particular class of thing - for example the 木wood radical is used in over 1,500 characters all with an association with trees or wood and 心heart radical is used in many characters indicating an emotion.

Since the Han dynasty the characters has remained pretty much unaltered over 2,000 years - new characters are needed and archaic ones have fallen out of use. The classic script which came into use c. 400CE has been used for official documents ever since. The writing of officials and scholars was different to that of everyday people and the term ‘Chinese Latin’ has been used to make the allusion to Europe when only the educated elite would use Latin not the vernacular language.

Over the centuries the original pictures have been simplified for ease of writing with a brush. In the list of characters below on the left in brown is the original script ‘picture’ from the Shang or Zhou dynasties - 3,000 years ago. In blue is the modern script which uses lines and avoids curves as much as it can. This simplification can make deciphering the origin of characters difficult.

The Chinese language is a treasure trove of history and traditions. This is not all that surprising as the language script has been in use for the past 4,000 years. There are more than a dozen identified script styles for writing Chinese. A good piece of calligraphy fetches as high a price at auction as a great painting.

According to tradition it was Cang Jie ➚仓颉 who devised the characters at the time of the Yellow Emperor. He observed the footprints of animals and birds and realized how just the shape of the print identified the animal. From this idea he applied the same principle to devising pictographs for many everyday objects (sun; moon; earth; clouds; birds; animals etc.). These characters (象形xiàng xíngimage shapes) have made their way into Japanese (Kanji ➚) and Korean scripts (Hangul ➚) too; so learning Chinese characters helps you read a little in Japan and Korea.

The full set of 50,000 or so characters have been divided into classes based on their origin for thousands of years. The vast majority (90%) are made up of a ‘radical’ combined with another element rather than a single pictorial representation.
Liu Xin ➚ and Xu Shen ➚ of the Han Dynasty used six classes : pictographs; indirect symbols; associative compounds; mutually interpreted symbols; borrowed characters and determinative phonetics. To get by in Chinese you only need to master about 500 of them.

person : 人 rén

The character for a person is a much simplified version of the pictogram of a figure leaning to the left, the leftmost stroke originally represented the arm. Now it is more-or-less just a pair of legs.

mountain : 山 shān

One of the clearest pictographs represents mountain. The original pictograph had two smaller humps with a central mountain, these have been simplified to become vertical lines over the years. This character is used in the names of two provinces Shanxi山西 (mountains west) and Shandong山东 (mountains east).

sheep; goat : 羊 yáng

A sheep or goat is recognizable from its horns. The modern character for a sheep has two dot strokes for the horns, a stroke for the eyes and one for the mouth.

bird : 鸟 niǎo

The pictogram for a bird has it sitting on a perch with one eye represented by a dot. This is one of the more pleasing simplifications as it manages to retain the original essence of the subject with very few strokes.

fish : 鱼 yú

The pictogram for a fish shows a head and a scaly body completed with a line to represent the fins. A fish is used as a symbol wishing good luck as it sounds the same as the character 余yú for abundance and affluence.

elephant; shape : 象 xiàng

In the modern character for an elephant the head is shown with the tusk and trunk protruding, so there are seven strokes in all to form the body. The elephant's head is drawn as an oblong. Several animals are captured as an easy to see pictogram such as this including horses; dogs and rabbits. Asian elephants used to be more widespread in China, today they are only seen in Yunnan province. A piece in Chinese chess is called an elephant, and the game itself is called Xiangqi or elephant game.

vehicle; car; train : 车 chē

The character for a vehicle used to make sense in its old script form, 車 it was a cart seen from above with an axle on either side. In the last major simplification of the Chinese script brought in by the People's Republic the character has been simplified to the extent that the ‘cart’ is rather hard to make out.

moon; month : 月 yuè

Of fundamental interest to our ancestors was the passage of the seasons, and the moon determined the date (from which we get the word month). The Chinese character for moon is an idealized crescent moon.

sun; day : 日 rì

The sun is simply a picture of the radiating circle. The ‘square’ form of all characters in this script forces the shape to be a box rather than a circle. In many cultures the sun is shown with an all seeing eye at its center, so the pictogram has a dot in the center to represent this.

mouth : 口 kǒu

Another round pictogram is mouth which has become a plain square without any embellishment. As a radical component it is often used in characters relating to speech.

gate; entrance : 门 mén

A straightforward character to memorize is a gateway or entrance as it is just a doorway with two doors. As with ‘vehicle’ the traditional form門 has recently been simplified for quicker drawing but retains the basic shape of how you would draw a gateway.

eye : 目 mù

The pictogram for an eye, is an eye on its side. The central iris of the eye has been reduced to two short strokes in the middle.

field : 田 tián

A field is an ancient character. It is an area divided up for cultivation with cross-paths.

rain : 雨 yǔ

A word of universal importance, particularly ages ago when almost everybody worked the land, is the one for rain. It has little drops falling downwards from the sky.

heart : 心 xīn

Another pictogram that once it is visualized as a picture, works well is heart. It has a simple shape, the dot (dian) strokes give an impression of blood in motion. You will see heart in combination with many other characters denoting a strong emotion, for example 热心rexin is literally hot heart meaning passionate, enthusiastic.

Have a word or character to look-up? Use our free and extensive online dictionary.

Characters have to identify more than just physical objects, words are needed for more abstract notions like spatial relationships. The following is a selection of a few common characters where the drawing brings an abstract idea to life.

up; above; on : 上 shàng

To give the concept of up; above; or over what could be simpler than an upright character? It is used in the name for Shanghai (上海) to roughly mean on-sea.

down; below : 下 xià

Once you have chosen how to represent up as a character then down; below or descend must be the mirror image of it.

center; middle : 中 zhōng

Another abstract notion is middle or center and this is quickly brought to mind by a symmetric figure, originally representing an arrow hitting the center of a target or may be the central portion of a flag. Most significant is its use in the Chinese word for China itself: 中国zhōng guómiddle or center country.

one; 1 : 一 yī

The easiest of all the abstract words are the numbers: 1, 2 and 3. They follow the Arabic/Indian system of being based on a count of strokes. So 1 is just one stroke.

two; 2 : 二 èr

Two: 2 must be two strokes.

three; 3 : 三 sān

Three: 3 follows the pattern with three strokes. You can think of Arabic 3 as three horizontal strokes linked together. Thereafter as in the Arabic system Chinese does not continue to add more strokes for 4; 5 etc..
See numbers section for the full set.

vast; open space : 广 guǎng

Another abstract notion is open space or vastness. The character consists of mainly open space, it used to have a character inside 廣. This character may be familiar to you already as it is part of the name of the ‘vast’ provinces Guangxi: 广西vast west and Guangdong: 广东vast east.

large; big : 大 dà

When you have relative abstract terms like up and down; you also need big and small. Big is just a big person人ren with an extra stroke suggesting out-stretched arms.

too; excessive : 太 tài

If you want to emphasize size even more so that it becomes excessively large, then just adding an extra stroke to big大da makes it too or excessive. The extra stroke was originally a line for emphasis but this has become a dot.

sky; heaven : 天 tiān

Another adaption of the big character is to add another heng line stroke at the top. This gives the concept of heaven or sky - a very large space that is above men.
This is the second tian we have used in this section. Tianheaven and Tianfield are distinguished by tones in pinyin. Heaven is first tonetiān while Field is second tone tián.

small : 小 xiǎo

The opposite to big is small and it is represented by an already small thing chopped in two.

less; fewer : 少 shǎo

At the opposite end of the size spectrum, cutting up something already small makes it even less. So another ‘cut’ stroke turns small (xiao) into less (shao).

Once you have a basic set of characters they can now be combined into composite characters in various ways to form new ideographs. This class of characters is called the 会意huì yìassociative compounds. The way they are combined can become complicated. sometimes the original meaning has been lost and the combination of characters has no modern significance.

bright; clear : 明 míng

If you combine moon and sun you have the two brightest objects in the sky. So the combined character of sun日 and moon月 makes the character for bright明.

snow : 雪 xuě

Combining the character for rain雨 with a broom gives another clear meaning - rain you need to brush away which is snow雪.

thunder : 雷 léi

Other characters are formed by combination with rain雨. In this case field田 and rain together make thunder雷. This has the evocative link of hearing an approaching storm out in the fields.

man; male : 男 nán

The field田 character can be combined with other characters. If it is added to strength li力, itself a pictograph of a muscled arm, then the character for male is constructed, reflecting the traditional role of men as the muscled toilers in the fields.

fishing : 渔 yú

The fish鱼 character can produce a number of related fishy meanings. If the radical for watershui水 is added to it as three ‘drops’ then we get the action of fishing. This is also a ‘phonetic’ clue as fish and fishing are both pronounced the same way.

fresh : 鲜 xiān

A quality of both fish and meat is that they need to be eaten while fresh as they go off quickly. So to convey the notion of freshness the characters for fishyu鱼 and sheepyang羊 are combined together.

ancient; old : 古 gǔ

Finally as an example of a more obscure but somehow delightful origin is the character for ancient. It is a combination of tenshi十 and mouthkou口 perhaps indicating words passed between ten people, or passed down through ten generations making it very ancient indeed.

Words

China's main holiday is the Spring Festival held in late January or early February. It is a very busy time and the public holiday lasts a whole week. It is a time to go back to your family home and celebrate the new year together with numerous traditions and festive food.

There is only so far you can go with characters, they all need to be easy to recognize uniquely and have to be learned by heart. Basic literacy is considered to require learning 2,000 characters. This figure clearly indicates that characters are not 'words', there are hundreds of thousands of words in both English and Chinese. In Chinese a single character rarely establishes meaning, this is clearly true in spoken Chinese when hundreds of characters sound exactly the same. To give a clear meaning two or more characters are needed together to form a word. Typically the characters reinforce each other in meaning, both separately refer to more or less the same thing and so dispel ambiguity. A classic example is 朋友péng yǒu where both 朋 and 友 independently mean friend but taken together they unambiguously mean friend. In my dictionary there are 15 homophones for 朋péng including 膨swollen; 棚shed; 鬅disheveled and 篷 sail; while 友yǒu has 13 homophones including: 懮relaxed; 牖lattice window; 黝dark green and 泑ceramic glaze. Hearing péng yǒu immediately identifies the meaning as friend.

Similarly characters together form a composite ‘word’ idea. 笑话xiào huàjoke is made up of 笑xiàolaugh; smile话huàspeech; words. There are many examples of this, where the combination conveys a more precise meaning than the individual parts.

It is quite common for two characters together to have a meaning separate from the component characters, rather like the case of some components within a single character described above. For example 东dōng 'east' and 西xī 'west' in combination can mean either east and west or very generic thing, stuff东西dōng xī. Another example is 雪恨xuě hènavenge which is made up of 雪snow and 恨hate; or 尘世chén shìmundane life made up of 尘dust; dirt and 世age; era; life; or 歪风wāi fēngunhealthy trend; bad influence made up of 歪crooked and 风wind.

Summary

chē车vehicle; car; train

dà大large; big

èr二two; 2

guǎng广vast; open space

gǔ古ancient; old

kǒu口mouth

léi雷thunder

mén门gate; entrance

míng明bright; clear

mù目eye

nán男man; male

niǎo鸟bird

rén人person

rì日sun; day

sān三three; 3

shān山mountain

shǎo少less; fewer

shàng上up; above; on

tài太too; excessive

tiān天sky; heaven

tián田field

xiān鲜fresh

xiǎo小small

xià下down; below

xiàng象elephant; shape

xīn心heart

xuě雪snow

yáng羊sheep; goat

yī一one; 1

yuè月moon; month

yú鱼fish

yú渔fishing

yǔ雨rain

zhōng中center; middle

A famous Tang Dynasty poem by Li Bai, wishing farewell to a friend in both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

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